2019: A Look Ahead for Enterprise Security

2019: A Look Ahead for Enterprise Security

We recently took a look back at the influences that helped shape the ongoing evolution of enterprise security in 2018. Now it’s time to help security professionals and corporate leadership prepare as much as possible with our perspective on what trends lie ahead in 2019.
It’s fair to say that companies will continue their security diligence into the new year. We can sum up the look ahead to 2019 fairly succinctly: More of the same, just different flavors. Meaning, we’ll have new flavors of the same malicious attempts to cause problems.
We expect these five trends to have the biggest influence on enterprise security in 2019:

Ransomeware Attacks Will Continue, But Shift Toward Consumers―Ransomeware attacks never seem to disappear, they just get a new name and morph into something more sophisticated with every passing year. While these attacks were originally geared toward businesses because of the ability to hold them hostage for large sums of money, cyber criminals are now targeting consumers―your employees, partners and vendors―as well. Unfortunately, people are paying the ransom, which is always a bad sign that it’s effective for fraudsters to continue to pursue this scheme. As for businesses, the ongoing threat of these attacks is leading to a lot more back-up solutions as entities try to find ways to recover without paying the ransom.

Real-time Analytics Will Take a Huge Leap Forward―As companies look for more reliable means to detect and prevent fraudulent activities, there will be a growing emphasis on real-time analytics that incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning. Real-time analytics has not been used as much as it could be— and should be. With the rise of AI and machine learning, solutions that incorporate these technologies will give enterprises the ability to identify suspect patterns in user interactions and transactions, then take steps to stop any fraudulent activity. This is certainly an area that will help companies lessen the severity of some of these threats, if not help stop them altogether.

Criminals Will Move Away from Bigger, More Obvious Targets―Fraudsters will migrate from the bigger entities that are hard to get into and prey on small- to mid-sized businesses that are more defenseless and more plentiful. It’s easier to get through two layers of security at a company that has five to 10 employees instead of a large corporate conglomerate with 20 layers of security. We saw this trend occur in the financial industry, where Bank of America, Citibank and Wells Fargo put multiple levels of security in place, which shifted the fraud targets down to smaller regional and local banks and credit unions.

“Zero Trust” Will Go Mainstream―Zero Trust (ZT) eliminates the idea of a single trusted network inside the corporate perimeter. Instead, it mandates that enterprises segment their networks and create microperimeters of control around their sensitive data assets to gain visibility into how data is accessed and used across the entire corporate ecosystem. We’re at a point where the more we move toward depending on the digital exchange of information for business and for personal use, the greater the risk of networks being compromised. A whole subset of enterprise security solutions, dubbed “next-generation access control,” will be key including those that develop correlations between accesses and users; make log-ins simpler through single sign-on (SSO); and further reduce threats through multifactor authentication.

“Convenience” Trade-Offs Will Fall Out of Favor―Companies will tire of making convenience trade-offs for good security. Enterprises will start to look for solutions that allow them to more easily and securely manage access to sensitive data while giving users a simplified way to manage logins across devices with one click, and only one set of credentials

Staying abreast of current trends, implementing the latest enterprise security technologies, and keeping network users’ experience top of mind will help your company proactively fight back against cyber threats in 2019.